[ Thanks to Carla Schroder for this
link. ]
“Let’s have a little chat about simplicity first, because I
think this is quite misunderstood. A personal computer is a mighty
all-purpose beast that serves whatever role you can imagine, and
Linux is the most flexible computing platform of all, for
everything from tiny embedded devices to supercomputers. The
average low-budget PC outperforms the supercomputers of
yesteryear.“This vast flexibility can be rather daunting, and one approach
to managing it is to strip away functionality and hide what it’s
doing from the fragile eyes of the user. That is supposed to make
it easier for us. I think it makes it harder because then we’re
stuck with an inflexible, opaque system that we cannot tailor to
our own needs, and we have to invest time and ingenuity in working
around the shortcomings of the ‘simplified” system.'”